Riding and writing

working cow

Two weekends ago was my first horse show and it has taken me this long to recover from it, let alone write about it.

Sitting down to write about it now, I almost don’t know what to say. Mostly because there are too many things to say. It was an intense, exhausting, instructive, surprising, and joyful experience with a lot of ups and downs. I learned things about riding, about Dunnie, and about myself and felt my brain come alive as it connected concepts from all over the place: my own experience, things I’ve been taught in the past, and disparate things I’ve read.

The clinic was awesome; in ways I enjoyed it better than most of the actual show. I was in the saddle pretty much the whole day from 9 a.m. to 4-ish p.m. with a decently long lunch break in between. I was bit concerned about being in the saddle that long, given that I typically ride for about an hour at a time, and by the end of the day I was feeling it — lots of tightness in my hip flexors, especially. But with stretching before bed that night and then again the next morning before the show, I was not too sore for the day ahead.

For the clinic, we were separated into groups that rotated through classes that matched the four classes we’d be competing in the next day: trail, ranch pleasure, working cow, and reining. Since three out of those four were things I really hadn’t practiced very much, I spent the day soaking up as much info as I could to try to do well (or, in the case of the working cow class, merely survive).

Trail

Trail isn’t what it sounds like; it’s not actually on a trail, it’s an obstacle course set up in the ring that represents things you might encounter on the trail, things such as: tree limbs set on the ground like poles that you have to trot or canter over; L-shaped chutes that you have to walk into and then back out of; wooden bridges your horse has to step up onto and down from without hesitating; and a big, metal gate that you have to sidle up to, open, walk through, and close. We had practiced all of the elements other than the gate once or twice in the back ring at the barn, and in the clinic Dunnie did really well on them. When we got to the gate, however, it didn’t go great. He was being very skittish about approaching it, and then I mistakenly opened it the wrong way and we had to start over. Then it took forever for me to get him near enough to open it again. We finally made it through, and then he wouldn’t let me get near enough to close it, and finally Dunnie had enough of it all and just pushed it closed for me with his nose (which is cute, but is not allowed; horses can’t touch the gate). We finished the rest of the course easily. The clinician was really encouraging and started out the whole class by saying that if we made mistakes, we should just laugh them off. So I didn’t get worked up about our troubles with the gate, but I suspected it might be troublesome in the show.

I was right, but I didn’t realize how right I was. The trail class was our first class of the day at the show, but it turned out that they had moved it outside to a hill area instead of in the covered arena where we’d had the clinic. Even though it was the first class of the day, I ended up drawing a very high order number so I didn’t have to go for like two hours after I got on and went over there — and it was already blazing hot then. Dunnie had been pretty excited the morning of the clinic, prancing around and whinnying at everyone, and then deciding he should touch all the horses standing around us with his nose all day — but when we did our classes, he had settled down and listened to me. So I thought we were in the clear, that he’d gotten his excitement out of the way the first day and the show day would be fine. When I took him out first thing on Saturday morning to warm him up, he felt great. But the combination of the new outdoor locale for our trail class and so many people around and my own excitement all contributed to him being jacked up beyond reach. I couldn’t get him to listen to me at all; instead he was just looking around at everything and charging around. I had never experienced him acting like that before. I knew going into the trail class that it was going to be a disaster, and it definitely was. Even all the elements that were easy for us the day before went awry. We made mistakes on every single element, all leading up to the ultimate fiasco wherein we couldn’t even approach the gate for what felt to me like 20 minutes but was probably 5 minutes or less. The part of me that knows that you need to school your horse in these situations and just get through the course, and the part of me that was determined not to fail, kept pushing forward and trying to calm him and make it work. But ultimately the part of me that was frustrated and hyper-aware of how much time we were taking when the show was already falling behind schedule, and just feeling confused and a little betrayed by my horse, won out and I motioned to the judge that we’d be bowing out of the class there.

Ranch Pleasure

Ranch pleasure is a class designed to showcase the movement and versatility of the working ranch-style horse. It’s set up in a ring where there are signs posted at various intervals that tell you what gait to pick up (walk, trot, extended trot, lope, extended lope), and a lot of what you’re judged on is the transitions. Dunnie and I do a lot of transition work at home, and I expected this to be the least challenging class for us.

In the clinic, everyone in the group took a turn going around doing what the signs told us to do. Most of the advice the clinician had for everyone was to go faster. He said that the speed that most people were doing at the extended lope was a good speed for the regular lope. His point was that if you pretend that you’re not in a little ring with signs in it but actually out on a ranch, you want to move with purpose so you can get where you’re going. He told an anecdote about a ranch in Wyoming, where a boy was dropped off in the morning and told to ride until he either saw some cows or a fence, and then to turn around and come back. They picked him up at sundown, by which point he had not yet encountered either cow or fence — it’s just that big out there.

We did all right in our turn in the clinic, and I was aware of the things I wanted to do better in the show, but I was still the least worried about this class. On the show day, by the time my class time came around, we’d had a couple of hours of downtime from the trail class, and I hoped Dunnie would be more relaxed. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case. Due to the show falling abysmally behind schedule by this point, they had decided to relocate the ranch pleasure class outdoors to where the trail class had been in order to free up the indoor ring. I tried to ride Dunnie in the warm-up ring, and my trainer even got on and schooled him, but he was still just acting totally out of control. She suggested that I do the class, but ride with two hands in order to school him and try to control him, which due to the rules about riding one-handed with a shank bit, would automatically disqualify me. But since I bombed the trail class, I knew I wasn’t winning any championships here, so I didn’t have much to lose. We were able to get through it and complete all of the required elements — with some extra flair, like Dunnie dropping his shoulder and shying away from some of the signs — and I felt really good about battling it out. I needed a win for myself at that point, because I was going to need a booster shot of confidence going into our next class, the dreaded Working Cow.

Working Cow

The working cow class loomed large in my imagination going into this show experience. Direct interaction with cows in my lifetime has been quite limited. I vaguely recall briefly milking one on a field trip to a farm in elementary school, and there was that giant cow that I would occasionally buy treats for at the general store and then feed over the fence at that farm/animal sanctuary/petting zoo/whatever it is that bizarrely exists smack-dab in the middle of a suburban street in my hometown on Long Island. To be honest, I’m kind of afraid of cows. They are big, and I don’t have enough experience of them to understand how their minds work.

At the barn we didn’t have any cows to practice on, but my trainer had told me that Dunnie had experience as a cow horse and that he becomes “electric” when confronted with cows. We did spend one lesson with a young girl from the barn pretending to be a cow and running along the fence. Dunnie was confused at first. His demeanor was kind of like, “Wait…you want me to…chase this…child?” and then when I said “Yep” and urged him on, he was like “ALL RIGHT, THEN!” and got really into it.

At the clinic, I was quite nervous. I purposefully signed up to be one of the last in my group to go so that I could watch as many people as possible and learn as much from the clinician as I could before it was my turn. The ring was fenced off to be a small portion, where the cow was let in through a gate and the rider attempted to keep him along that wall. The clinician was also in there on his horse talking us through it, and there were other guys on horses that would come in to collect the cow and bring it out through the gate after each was done. Right off the bat when they let all the cows in the ring at the beginning, Dunnie was super interested, which at first made me a little tense.

Dunnie reacting to the cows.

But as the clinic drew on and I began to understand more of what we needed to do and how to do it, and to get some sense of how the cows were going to react to all of this, I really started to relax. The girls from my barn, who were sorted into another group because they are Youth instead of Novice (like me), were able to come by and sit with me and watch, and having them around made it much easier to lighten up and have fun. They were excited to see Dunnie in action with the cows and we all laughed together about his reaction to them, especially when a rider drove one near the fence we were behind and he put his ears back at the little cow.

For our turn, we ended up having a cow that wasn’t too interested in running around. She kind of just went into the corner and I had to keep approaching her to incite her to move so we could then chase her along the fence. Dunnie was a bit overstimulated and kept backing up instead of going forward, but once we got the cow moving I could feel the cow horse I had under me come awake and start to get a sense of his athleticism. After it was done, I was greatly relieved to have survived it, and even felt like I had made some interesting conceptual connections with working the cows and a book I had read about taming wild mustangs (which I’ll save for its own separate post because this one is already becoming novel length).

On show day, the relief I had felt after the cow class in the clinic was doing little to mitigate my nervousness. So far, I’d had two classes on a horse that wasn’t listening to me because he was too riled up by his surroundings, and now I was about to put him in the ring with something that demonstrably gets him even more excited. In the show, the ring was not going to be cordoned off — it was the whole entire ring I’d be dealing with, giving the cow ample room to run us ragged. I seriously considered scratching the class for a few moments. But this was what I was there for, what I had gone through the expense and trouble to get to and then sat around in the sweltering heat all day for, to learn and gain experience. So I decided to go in there and set my goal as simply getting through it. I was definitely not, as many of the other riders did, going to chase the cow down the long side of the ring at top speed, no matter how fun that looked. I was going to go in there and do my best to control my horse and hope that now, after several hours in his stall and a thunderstorm that had broken up some of the unbearable heat of the day, he would be ready to listen to me.

And for whatever reason, he was. Maybe it was just the outdoor situation that had put him over the edge all morning, and now that we were in a ring he felt more comfortable. Maybe it was my own exhaustion that pushed me past even being capable of exhibiting anxiety anymore, ending the feedback loop of bad energy that had been carried through the reins between us all day. But when I got on Dunnie, he was the horse I know and trust again. And we went into the cow class and did exactly what I wanted to do. You can watch a video of it. It looks really boring, because the cow immediately gives us the slip and we just very slowly and sedately follow him down the ring and collect him. But it felt like a huge accomplishment, and I was incredibly pleased. And now that I’ve done it and survived, I’m SO EXCITED to do it again because when I watch people who are really getting into it, it looks like so much fun. I think Dunnie and I will have a blast the next time we do this. The relief I felt after this class at having my partner back came at a good time — before our final class, and the one that I really cared the most about — reining.

Reining

Reining has been the main thing that Dunnie and I practice at home. We had the pattern memorized and had been fine-tuning it for weeks. With the exception of the sliding stop, which we didn’t work on because Dunnie doesn’t have the right shoes for it, I felt we could do all of the required elements and do them well.

The reining clinic was very interesting, and extremely helpful in fixing a specific problem we’d been having with our lead changes. In this video, taken the week before the show, you can see that on the left-to-right change (the second one in the video), Dunnie anticipates the lead change and changes his back feet first, goes a couple strides, and then changes his front lead. The ideal is to change them both at once. I brought this issue up with the clinician, and he gave me really good instruction. First, we worked on moving Dunnie’s hip at the walk (something we’ve also been working on since we came back from the show and which I’ll write more about soon). Once we got that down, he suggested that I try the lead change again, but this time to have a little more propulsion to my lope. It worked right away; Dunnie gave me such a smooth, pretty lead change that I almost didn’t know it happened until the clinician smiled and congratulated me. Since this was the one element I had any concern about in our reining pattern going into the show, I was really pleased and grateful to have learned a fix for it.

The reining class on show day was the culmination of an extremely long, insanely delayed day full of “hurry up and wait.” We got up at 6 a.m., got to the show grounds by 7:45, and I was up on my horse (and waiting in the sun) for my first class at around 9:30. My last class, the reining class, was originally scheduled for around 4–5 p.m.; I actually rode close to 9 p.m. By that point, everyone was hot and drained and also worrying about getting everything cleaned and packed up so that we could leave at a reasonable hour for the 1.5-hour-long drive home. I hadn’t had any dinner, but my blood sugar was saved by one of the barn moms giving me all her remaining peanut m&ms. I just wanted to shower off the 10 gallons of sweat on my body and go to sleep. But I was also really excited about the reining class, and once I got up on Dunnie and was sitting in that chute waiting for our number to be called, everything that had been so hectic and out of control and confusing and stressful all day just turned instead into a feeling of buoyant confidence and focus.

We entered the ring at a collected trot and any last concerns I had about Dunnie being there with me were gone. We stopped in the center, waiting for the signal from the judge to begin. From a stop, when we picked up our right-lead canter, everything was amazing. I’d done that same pattern with Dunnie a million times at home; some days were pretty good, some were a little messy. But it had never felt the way it did at the show. It was like being in the show arena woke something up in him and he was just on. I was feeling it too, and while it was happening it was somehow simultaneously hyper-real and dream-like. Pretty much all of it was better than we had ever done it before, including nailing the lead changes and even getting a little bit of a slide on some of the stops. It was thrilling. There’s a video of it, and when I first had the chance to watch it I actually dreaded doing so a little bit, because I was worried that it wasn’t going to look as good as it felt. But I was so happy to see that it did!

Right after I finished my round, I jumped off Dunnie, threw my arms around his neck for a huge hug, and then basically put him right on the trailer. We left right after that and got home at 11 p.m., at which point I crashed harder than I can remember doing in a very, very long time.

Because we left so quickly, I didn’t get a chance to see any of my scores. I think that SHOT will eventually post them online, and I’m looking forward to seeing them (or at least the reining score) so I can learn where to improve for next time. Now that we have our first show under our belt and have dealt with all the newness and uncertainty which that entails, I can’t wait to do it all again and do it better.